Community > Epistemics
Community is more important to EA than epistemics. What drives EA's greater impact isn’t just reasoning, but collaboration. Twenty “90% smart” people are much more likely identify more impactful interventions than two “100% smart” people.

I may be biased by how I found EA—working alone on “finding most impactful work” before stumbling into the EA community—but this is the point: EA isn’t unique for asking, “How can I use reason to find the most impactful interventions?” Others ask that too. EA is unique because it gathers those people, and facilitates funding and coordination, enabling far more careful and comprehensive work.

I have not contemplated deeply the meaning of Rethink Priority's findings on cross cause prioritization, but my perhaps shallow understanding was that despite somewhat high likelihood of AI catastrophe arriving quite soon, "traditional" animal welfare looked good in expectation. I think the point was something like despite quite high chances of AI catastrophe, the even higher chances (but far from 100%) of survival means in expectation animal welfare looks very good. So while it is not guaranteed animal welfare interventions will pay off due to an intervening AI crisis, it is still worth the bet unless you think value growth is extremely high (cubic or logistic) and there are only a very few periods from now until "infinite time" that x-risk will be high (only one or two such periods). I did not read your post carefully, but did you take this into account? That even if there might be a 30% chance of imminent AI catastrophe, the remaining 70% chance of "success" makes animal welfare with longer time horizons still look good in expectation? 

One non-expert idea here is to assume that all the building blocks of mirror bacteria exist - what would it take then to create effective mirror phages? Is there any way we can make progress on this already, without those building blocks, but knowing roughly what they are? And in a defense favoring way? Again I would really align with other biosec folks on this at OP, Blueprint and MBDF as I feel very hesitant about unilateral actions. But something like this might have legs, especially if some plausible work can be outlined that can be done with current techniques.

Hi Nnaemeka, yeah I totally agree about not doing something potentially advancing the creation of dangerous mirror organisms. I am commenting just to iterate what I said about "defense-favoring" - I know little of microbiology but thought I would mention just in case there might be some way to very lightly modify an existing non-mirror phage to "hunt and kill" mirror microbes (e.g. just altering their "tracking" and "ingestion" system). But this is probably an incredibly naive idea but thought I would put it out there as there is a whole chapter on phages in the mirror bio report. Also, my impression from the report is that there is scientific uncertainty about how bad mirror bio would be. It might be worth solidifying this by e.g. taking single parts of plant or human immune systems and exposing them only to simple, single mirror molecules that would likely be present on mirror organisms. This might show definitely that mirror bio might be catastrophic. But I would do any such work in really tight cooperation with the Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund and others and definitely not act unilaterally. It might at least be worth it to read at least the most relevant parts of the mirror bio report if you might have time.